If you are reading this, it is likely that the world has not yet been swallowed up by an accidental black hole. When, at 1 pm IST, the Large Hadron Collider was switched on at the EU’s giant laboratory for particle physics research, the fear that the accelerating streams of protons inside the collider would cause a quasar to form inside the earth’s core that would expand within a few hours to destroy the planet proved to be ill-founded. Of course, there’s no pleasing some critics — one respectable German chemist has asked the EU’s human rights commission to shut it down, saying that within the next few years light rays will start emerging from the Indian Ocean that will eventually cause a “Biblical Armageddon”.

Of course, streams of well-known nuclear physicists have pointed out several flaws with this theory (such high-energy reactions take place all the time in space around us without causing Armageddons) but the possibility of a bunch of mad scientists imagining the end of the world is too exciting for cold hard probabilities to be considered. This is a somewhat amusing example, but it reflects a deeper problem in our society: overestimating the danger of small-probability events, a reflex belief that science would happily sacrifice safety to progress — which leads to such things as a distrust of GM agriculture; an obsessive focus on air crashes or terrorism as opposed to, say, road safety; paranoia about stem cells and cellular cloning; and the fact that AIDS research gets more funding than that much more deadly disease, malaria.

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